I believe that they write their EULA's to cover their asses. Nice dodge of the question though. It's apparent you aren't the sort of person who believes that parents should be accountable for the actions of their children.
It's also pretty easy to see who has been raised to be responsible for their actions, versus those who look to others to absolve their responsibilities onto.
I'm sure that you've heard the saying, "There is no such thing as a free lunch." Be honest with yourself. Did you ever take a second to look into all of the "Free" apps, or even one particular free app that burned your wallet? Did you ever ask yourself, "How is it that these people can afford to put out 'free' applications?" Did you bother to read a EULA or TOS, or are you like 99% of Slashdotters who feel that those terms are usually so unreasonable that you just dismiss them as unenforceable because that's how you want the world to be?
If you did your due diligence and still got burned, then you have a legal leg to stand on. If you just handed your kid a phone, and some free apps and ended up losing money because you couldn't be bothered to read some fine print, well then life sucks, get a helmet and be smarter next time.
I think the most pathetic thing is that this is being framed as "think of the children" argument. The real headline should have been, "Parents learn that digital free lunches are a myth."
You also have a wallet. If you have a wallet, that is a different idea than carrying it around in your pocket. A wallet is meant to handle change. A pocket on the other hand usually gets emptied out. Very few people will grab a handful of change at the beginning of the day and put it in their pocket. Change tends to accumulate in a pocket over the course of a day, and end up in some sort of container at the end of the day (change bowl, jar, etc)
Thanks for the info. I have been playing MoH lately. I skipped out on MW2 when it came out and refused to buy Black Ops because of the way they treated the IW devs. I figured it was only a matter of time, and now I'm pretty bummed out, truth be told.
We're talking about recent developments though, right? This is all because of that GeoHotz bullshit?
That's right. No harm, no foul. Part of having children is the contract that you as a parent have with society. You agree to be responsible for them. You don't pawn off your responsibility on someone else.
I have a hard time feeling sorry for parents who can afford to give their children iPhones, yet "can't" afford some unintended charges.
This whole case just reminds me of what is wrong with our society on a larger level. Nobody wants to accept responsibility for their actions, or the actions of those they are responsible for. From parents who don't want to pay some unintended iPhone charges, to the CEO of Goldman Sachs who doesn't want to be held accountable for the actions of his employees. We live in a culture where very few are held accountable for their actions.
Hell, look at the article on the TSA that was posted here today. Airport screeners whose job it is to find hidden weapons, failed to find hidden weapons five times in five tests. That is a 100% failure rate. They weren't even disciplined, much less fired.
If those apps prey on children, it's no longer the developers who are to blame, but Apple.
I think you need to familiarize yourself with the concept of a "legal guardian", and the responsibilities that they have for their children. The child abusers are the parents who fail to educate their children. The parents are at fault for failing to understand that they are giving their children the power to spend money. If the parents do not want the money to be spent, they need to be smarter about it.
The parents need to learn the hard lesson. If their kid racks up $500 in online purchases in one month, ground the kid. Explain to them how they fucked up.
When I was kid, I played a lot of Sierra games... Kings Quest, Space Quest, et al. There were parts in the games that were pretty difficult for a six or seven year old to figure out. Well, luckily Sierra offered a tip line. It was one of those 976 numbers. Well, after one month of using the tip line, my parents figured out it was time to explain to me what a phone bill was. They didn't freak out and sue Sierra because I racked up a couple of hundred dollars in phone charges (and this was in the 1980s).
Anyone who says this is anyone's responsibility besides the parents who decided to give their children access to a $300+ smartphone is an idiot. You don't get to sue a company because your kid caused you some financial distress.
No, greedy lawyers are suing Apple, and they managed to get enough people to respond to their mass mailers that they were able to put together a class. Have no doubt about it, those lawyers are the scum sucking bottom of the legal world.
If you think about it, twelve quarters is a lot of change. Anything more than a dollar in change is a lot of change. How much change do you get per transaction, on average? Maybe 30-60 cents? How many cash transactions do you do between your home and the airport? In this day and age, with most payments being done electronically, walking around with three dollars worth of quarters is strange, unless you're on the way to the laundromat.
But the PC does have unique features as a platform
Like aimbots, and wall hacks. I like the idea of cross platform gaming, but I hope they resist the urge to merge the two platforms (consoles and PCs) on FPS titles. I can deal with people who think their mouse / keyboard are a superior interface (and in most instances I'd agree). I can't deal with cheaters. They ruin the games for everyone.
They are not the only corporation that has to give up encryption keys and deal with other nonsense to do business in foreign countries. The other day I was talking to a guy who used to work for Accenture. He was telling me that it was standard operating procedure to be contractually required to give up encryption keys for applications when doing work in Asia and the Middle East. It's like the dirty little secret of corporate America. If you want to do business overseas, you have to roll over on some issues.
As much as I rail against Google products as being hacked together and half finished the large majority of the time, at least their corporate officers have the balls to tell China to go fuck themselves, even when it cost them market share in the largest emerging market.
If I were a RIM shareholder, I would be dumping their stock and not looking back. The last leg that they had to stand on in the enterprise market was their reputation for security. It seems that more and more corporations are embracing ActiveSync for their Exchange to smart phone email conduit. Hell, even Apple licensed ActiveSync from Microsoft and incorporated into iOS. If that is not handing writing on the wall, what is?
I work for a pretty security conscious corporation that has a lot of legal liability for keeping client data secure. Our laptops are running PGP FDE, we have to use VPNs for practically everything, the only USB drives we can plug into the corporate machines are IronKeys, etc. I figured we'd be one of the last places to ever ditch BES, but the mandate just came down a couple of months ago. By 2012, everyone is going to be on an iPhone or Droid. RIM is going to be out about 5000 BES licenses. We can't be the only one deciding to ditch RIM.
What else does RIM have left? Some cheesy "Playbook" that they are hoping can compete against the iPad and Android? Yeah right.
On top of all of that, their top level executives cannot even handle a curve ball question during a televised interview. That ship is sinking, fast.
To paraphrase the author, "What I will say isn't popular..."... here on Slashdot, but I'm going to say it anyway. DRM in and of itself does not drive people to pirate games. I say this as someone who used to courier gigabytes of warez a month back when a 14400 baud modem was considered lightning fast, and the only way to get "0 day" warez was to download them from Europe and take advantage of the fact that their day started before ours.
People pirate software because they are cheap, unethical bastards. I swapped warez because I was a kid and my parents couldn't afford to buy me all the new games. I justified it to myself because a lot of the times the games sucked, and I would have been upset if I had actually spent money on the games. However, even as a punk ass, thieving teenage kid, I still bought games from studios that put out quality products because even back then, I understood that studios need support to stay in business.
DRM being a source of piracy is a load of crap. People are stealing because they do not care. They should just come out and admit it. They couldn't give two shits about the coders and project managers, marketing people, game testers and everyone else who is trying to make a living by putting out what they hope will be fun, enjoyable, entertaining software. Sure, there are some flops. Sure, it would be nice if you could "try before you buy", but lets face it, that is not and cannot ever be a viable business model. It takes too much time and effort to get a game out the door. A company can't put out a half assed game and tell the public, "If you like this, buy it and we'll keep making it better." Look how much people whine about DownLoadable Content (DLC). "It should have been included in the first game. Damn game studios, nickle and diming me death." Look at how people whine about WoW "Damn Blizzard, expecting me to pay every month. Those servers should be free damn it!"
It's really easy to put the blame for a-moral, anti-social behavior on the others. It takes some real strength of character to look at yourself in the mirror and acknowledge that you are ripping someone else off.
Frankly, I'm sick of it. In theory geeks should be some of the smartest, most enlightened people around. In reality, they're just as a-moral and pathetic on certain subjects as "Joe Sixpack" and the rest of the stereotypical personifications of lame behavior that they rail against on a regular basis.
Before people go nuts on this post, realize that I'm not saying I support DRM, or root kit like behavior, or software phoning home. I'm saying that using those as an excuse for piracy (the gist of the article) is a load of crap. If a person does not like DRM, don't support publisher. If you buy a game, and want to download a no-CD crack, or download a modded exe to get rid of some phone home behavior, I believe that is your right as a consumer. Go on with your bad self, DMCA be damned. But don't pirate a game, and try to justify it as anything else besides outright theft.
I'm glad that my memory isn't totally shot. The first thing that came to mind was using kermit to transfer files. Zmodem was definitely the way to go though.
Funny, I think you're an idiot if you believe that society would be better off if kids are encouraged to give into their natural urges to attack people who upset them.
The imagination is a powerful thing. I've seen kids come out of the movie theater after watching Kung Fu Panda, and they were trying to kung fu fight each other. That was after what... 90 minutes of animated animals fighting each other. I remember when Power Rangers was popular. Kids all over the place were "playing" Power Rangers, punching and hitting and kicking at each other.
Violence is an innate inclination in human beings. Part of becoming cultured and civilized is learning to find other solutions to inter-personal problems that do not involve the quick and dirty inclination to just simply remove the problem.
On one level the issue is the cultural acceptance of certain behaviors. Look at a game like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that portrays the gang life style. Sure, there are gangsters in any city of any reasonable size. Yet to glorify that behavior to the point where you are allowing children to live it sends the wrong messages. It delivers the message that such behavior is okay. Perhaps it is funny. Dangerous? Nope, it's a video game. You die and come back to life.
During play time, children try on roles. Every second they spend "playing" a socially destructive role is a second wasted where their mind is not focused on making positive contributions to their environment.
I'm in the same boat. I saw a Slashdot t-shirt at a Defcon, and my only thought was, "Not as cool as my 'I Spotted the Fed t-shirt'." It would have been cool to have been on the site sooner. Even though the old timers whine about how it has gone down hill, I enjoy the conversations and the subject matter.
It sounds like IT needs a clue. Where I work they put PGP FDE on every laptop. The option to encrypt is not left up to the user at all. The laptop is encrypted and that is that.
The program seems to be a good one. If you want to, you can completely replace your router with the one they send you. I decided to put mine outside of the firewall because I don't like the idea of having some random device inside the perimeter.
It is a simple program. I plugged in the Netgear router in between my firewall and my cable modem and configured it as a bridge. It analyzes the traffic and sends the information to the FCC.
I love how some people here are whining about privacy. I think those people will whine about anything. What is the alternative? The data needs to be collected. Either you want the government to step in and regulate the telcos, or you don't. If you don't, then STFU and stop whining about the crappy service they are giving you. If you do, then realize you have to be part of the solution. Whining about it never fixed anything. At some point, someone has to collect some data.
If you don't want to participate in the program, don't. On the other hand, I'm happy to know that the FCC is getting some real data to show that when I fire up my VPN client from home to do some work, everything else on the network (NetFlix, et al) gets throttled back to next to nothing. I'm happy to be a guinea pig so that the FCC an see that the supposedly "faster" connection that I'm paying for is not really any faster than the basic package.
If you're doing something with your internet connection that the government cares about, they already know about you. Participating in some research is not going to suddenly put you on their radar. Your browsing history is a lot less interesting to most people than you think it is. The country is involved in two wars and the economy is crumbling around us. Do you really think the government cares if you want to wank off to www.fatmomfetish.com, or whatever other "super secret private" stuff you are doing with your internet connection? Running a Tor exit node? Seeding the latest movie rip? Ooooo, you crazy rebels you!
Slashdot Mirror
I believe that they write their EULA's to cover their asses. Nice dodge of the question though. It's apparent you aren't the sort of person who believes that parents should be accountable for the actions of their children.
It's also pretty easy to see who has been raised to be responsible for their actions, versus those who look to others to absolve their responsibilities onto.
I'm sure that you've heard the saying, "There is no such thing as a free lunch." Be honest with yourself. Did you ever take a second to look into all of the "Free" apps, or even one particular free app that burned your wallet? Did you ever ask yourself, "How is it that these people can afford to put out 'free' applications?" Did you bother to read a EULA or TOS, or are you like 99% of Slashdotters who feel that those terms are usually so unreasonable that you just dismiss them as unenforceable because that's how you want the world to be?
If you did your due diligence and still got burned, then you have a legal leg to stand on. If you just handed your kid a phone, and some free apps and ended up losing money because you couldn't be bothered to read some fine print, well then life sucks, get a helmet and be smarter next time.
I think the most pathetic thing is that this is being framed as "think of the children" argument. The real headline should have been, "Parents learn that digital free lunches are a myth."
You also have a wallet. If you have a wallet, that is a different idea than carrying it around in your pocket. A wallet is meant to handle change. A pocket on the other hand usually gets emptied out. Very few people will grab a handful of change at the beginning of the day and put it in their pocket. Change tends to accumulate in a pocket over the course of a day, and end up in some sort of container at the end of the day (change bowl, jar, etc)
Thanks for the info. I have been playing MoH lately. I skipped out on MW2 when it came out and refused to buy Black Ops because of the way they treated the IW devs. I figured it was only a matter of time, and now I'm pretty bummed out, truth be told.
We're talking about recent developments though, right? This is all because of that GeoHotz bullshit?
That's right. No harm, no foul. Part of having children is the contract that you as a parent have with society. You agree to be responsible for them. You don't pawn off your responsibility on someone else.
I have a hard time feeling sorry for parents who can afford to give their children iPhones, yet "can't" afford some unintended charges.
This whole case just reminds me of what is wrong with our society on a larger level. Nobody wants to accept responsibility for their actions, or the actions of those they are responsible for. From parents who don't want to pay some unintended iPhone charges, to the CEO of Goldman Sachs who doesn't want to be held accountable for the actions of his employees. We live in a culture where very few are held accountable for their actions.
Hell, look at the article on the TSA that was posted here today. Airport screeners whose job it is to find hidden weapons, failed to find hidden weapons five times in five tests. That is a 100% failure rate. They weren't even disciplined, much less fired.
If those apps prey on children, it's no longer the developers who are to blame, but Apple.
I think you need to familiarize yourself with the concept of a "legal guardian", and the responsibilities that they have for their children. The child abusers are the parents who fail to educate their children. The parents are at fault for failing to understand that they are giving their children the power to spend money. If the parents do not want the money to be spent, they need to be smarter about it.
The parents need to learn the hard lesson. If their kid racks up $500 in online purchases in one month, ground the kid. Explain to them how they fucked up.
When I was kid, I played a lot of Sierra games... Kings Quest, Space Quest, et al. There were parts in the games that were pretty difficult for a six or seven year old to figure out. Well, luckily Sierra offered a tip line. It was one of those 976 numbers. Well, after one month of using the tip line, my parents figured out it was time to explain to me what a phone bill was. They didn't freak out and sue Sierra because I racked up a couple of hundred dollars in phone charges (and this was in the 1980s).
Anyone who says this is anyone's responsibility besides the parents who decided to give their children access to a $300+ smartphone is an idiot. You don't get to sue a company because your kid caused you some financial distress.
No, greedy lawyers are suing Apple, and they managed to get enough people to respond to their mass mailers that they were able to put together a class. Have no doubt about it, those lawyers are the scum sucking bottom of the legal world.
If you think about it, twelve quarters is a lot of change. Anything more than a dollar in change is a lot of change. How much change do you get per transaction, on average? Maybe 30-60 cents? How many cash transactions do you do between your home and the airport? In this day and age, with most payments being done electronically, walking around with three dollars worth of quarters is strange, unless you're on the way to the laundromat.
[Citation needed]
But the PC does have unique features as a platform
Like aimbots, and wall hacks. I like the idea of cross platform gaming, but I hope they resist the urge to merge the two platforms (consoles and PCs) on FPS titles. I can deal with people who think their mouse / keyboard are a superior interface (and in most instances I'd agree). I can't deal with cheaters. They ruin the games for everyone.
It looks like VMware is using it. I installed their client software yesterday and part of the installer routine had to install J# first.
They are not the only corporation that has to give up encryption keys and deal with other nonsense to do business in foreign countries. The other day I was talking to a guy who used to work for Accenture. He was telling me that it was standard operating procedure to be contractually required to give up encryption keys for applications when doing work in Asia and the Middle East. It's like the dirty little secret of corporate America. If you want to do business overseas, you have to roll over on some issues.
As much as I rail against Google products as being hacked together and half finished the large majority of the time, at least their corporate officers have the balls to tell China to go fuck themselves, even when it cost them market share in the largest emerging market.
If I were a RIM shareholder, I would be dumping their stock and not looking back. The last leg that they had to stand on in the enterprise market was their reputation for security. It seems that more and more corporations are embracing ActiveSync for their Exchange to smart phone email conduit. Hell, even Apple licensed ActiveSync from Microsoft and incorporated into iOS. If that is not handing writing on the wall, what is?
I work for a pretty security conscious corporation that has a lot of legal liability for keeping client data secure. Our laptops are running PGP FDE, we have to use VPNs for practically everything, the only USB drives we can plug into the corporate machines are IronKeys, etc. I figured we'd be one of the last places to ever ditch BES, but the mandate just came down a couple of months ago. By 2012, everyone is going to be on an iPhone or Droid. RIM is going to be out about 5000 BES licenses. We can't be the only one deciding to ditch RIM.
What else does RIM have left? Some cheesy "Playbook" that they are hoping can compete against the iPad and Android? Yeah right.
On top of all of that, their top level executives cannot even handle a curve ball question during a televised interview. That ship is sinking, fast.
To paraphrase the author, "What I will say isn't popular..." ... here on Slashdot, but I'm going to say it anyway. DRM in and of itself does not drive people to pirate games. I say this as someone who used to courier gigabytes of warez a month back when a 14400 baud modem was considered lightning fast, and the only way to get "0 day" warez was to download them from Europe and take advantage of the fact that their day started before ours.
People pirate software because they are cheap, unethical bastards. I swapped warez because I was a kid and my parents couldn't afford to buy me all the new games. I justified it to myself because a lot of the times the games sucked, and I would have been upset if I had actually spent money on the games. However, even as a punk ass, thieving teenage kid, I still bought games from studios that put out quality products because even back then, I understood that studios need support to stay in business.
DRM being a source of piracy is a load of crap. People are stealing because they do not care. They should just come out and admit it. They couldn't give two shits about the coders and project managers, marketing people, game testers and everyone else who is trying to make a living by putting out what they hope will be fun, enjoyable, entertaining software. Sure, there are some flops. Sure, it would be nice if you could "try before you buy", but lets face it, that is not and cannot ever be a viable business model. It takes too much time and effort to get a game out the door. A company can't put out a half assed game and tell the public, "If you like this, buy it and we'll keep making it better." Look how much people whine about DownLoadable Content (DLC). "It should have been included in the first game. Damn game studios, nickle and diming me death." Look at how people whine about WoW "Damn Blizzard, expecting me to pay every month. Those servers should be free damn it!"
It's really easy to put the blame for a-moral, anti-social behavior on the others. It takes some real strength of character to look at yourself in the mirror and acknowledge that you are ripping someone else off.
Frankly, I'm sick of it. In theory geeks should be some of the smartest, most enlightened people around. In reality, they're just as a-moral and pathetic on certain subjects as "Joe Sixpack" and the rest of the stereotypical personifications of lame behavior that they rail against on a regular basis.
Before people go nuts on this post, realize that I'm not saying I support DRM, or root kit like behavior, or software phoning home. I'm saying that using those as an excuse for piracy (the gist of the article) is a load of crap. If a person does not like DRM, don't support publisher. If you buy a game, and want to download a no-CD crack, or download a modded exe to get rid of some phone home behavior, I believe that is your right as a consumer. Go on with your bad self, DMCA be damned. But don't pirate a game, and try to justify it as anything else besides outright theft.
It's just in Beta still.
but there was something delightful about being part of a tiny group of weirdos connecting to each other with ATA commands and some guy's hobby board.
There sure was. At one point it was a matter of pride for me to be able to type faster than the modem buffer could handle.
I'm glad that my memory isn't totally shot. The first thing that came to mind was using kermit to transfer files. Zmodem was definitely the way to go though.
He's running a Mac, duh. That shit "just works", or did you not have your daily glass of Kool Aid?
Funny, I think you're an idiot if you believe that society would be better off if kids are encouraged to give into their natural urges to attack people who upset them.
The imagination is a powerful thing. I've seen kids come out of the movie theater after watching Kung Fu Panda, and they were trying to kung fu fight each other. That was after what... 90 minutes of animated animals fighting each other. I remember when Power Rangers was popular. Kids all over the place were "playing" Power Rangers, punching and hitting and kicking at each other.
Violence is an innate inclination in human beings. Part of becoming cultured and civilized is learning to find other solutions to inter-personal problems that do not involve the quick and dirty inclination to just simply remove the problem.
On one level the issue is the cultural acceptance of certain behaviors. Look at a game like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that portrays the gang life style. Sure, there are gangsters in any city of any reasonable size. Yet to glorify that behavior to the point where you are allowing children to live it sends the wrong messages. It delivers the message that such behavior is okay. Perhaps it is funny. Dangerous? Nope, it's a video game. You die and come back to life.
During play time, children try on roles. Every second they spend "playing" a socially destructive role is a second wasted where their mind is not focused on making positive contributions to their environment.
I'm in the same boat. I saw a Slashdot t-shirt at a Defcon, and my only thought was, "Not as cool as my 'I Spotted the Fed t-shirt'." It would have been cool to have been on the site sooner. Even though the old timers whine about how it has gone down hill, I enjoy the conversations and the subject matter.
It sounds like IT needs a clue. Where I work they put PGP FDE on every laptop. The option to encrypt is not left up to the user at all. The laptop is encrypted and that is that.
The program seems to be a good one. If you want to, you can completely replace your router with the one they send you. I decided to put mine outside of the firewall because I don't like the idea of having some random device inside the perimeter.
I can check the model when I get home. It's their high-end home / small office router. GigE, Wireless-N. It's stable. I've never had to reboot it.
It is a simple program. I plugged in the Netgear router in between my firewall and my cable modem and configured it as a bridge. It analyzes the traffic and sends the information to the FCC.
I love how some people here are whining about privacy. I think those people will whine about anything. What is the alternative? The data needs to be collected. Either you want the government to step in and regulate the telcos, or you don't. If you don't, then STFU and stop whining about the crappy service they are giving you. If you do, then realize you have to be part of the solution. Whining about it never fixed anything. At some point, someone has to collect some data.
If you don't want to participate in the program, don't. On the other hand, I'm happy to know that the FCC is getting some real data to show that when I fire up my VPN client from home to do some work, everything else on the network (NetFlix, et al) gets throttled back to next to nothing. I'm happy to be a guinea pig so that the FCC an see that the supposedly "faster" connection that I'm paying for is not really any faster than the basic package.
If you're doing something with your internet connection that the government cares about, they already know about you. Participating in some research is not going to suddenly put you on their radar. Your browsing history is a lot less interesting to most people than you think it is. The country is involved in two wars and the economy is crumbling around us. Do you really think the government cares if you want to wank off to www.fatmomfetish.com, or whatever other "super secret private" stuff you are doing with your internet connection? Running a Tor exit node? Seeding the latest movie rip? Ooooo, you crazy rebels you!